Michael Nelson was
General Manager of Reuters (www.reuters.com),
the international news organisation. Nelson was born near London on 30
April 1929. He was educated at Latymer Upper School, London, and
Magdalen College, Oxford, where he read Modern History. He joined
Reuters as a journalist in 1952.

Since he retired
from Reuters in 1989 he has written three books - War of the Black
Heavens: The Battles of Western Broadcasting in the Cold War (Syracuse
University Press and Brasseys, London, 1997); Queen Victoria and the
Discovery of the Riviera, (I.B. Tauris, 2001) and Americans and the
Making of the Riviera (McFarland, 2007).

Nelson, who lives
in Notting Hill, London, and Opio, France, is married to the former
Helga den Ouden and they have two sons and one daughter.

This is the first book devoted to the
unsung American achievement of creating the summer season on the French Riviera:
before the Americans arrived in the 1920s of the last century visitors came only
in the winter.

The first important American to visit the
Riviera was Thomas Jefferson in the eighteenth century. In the nineteenth
century the eccentric James Gordon Bennett Jr., owner of the New York Herald,
poured millions of dollars into making Beaulieu-sur-Mer a leading resort. But
Cole Porter invented the summer season on the Riviera. He and his wife rented a
house on Cap d'Antibes for two summers and invited the wealthy Americans Gerald
and Sara Murphy to stay. The Murphys then invited Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald.
And thus was the new season launched.

In the Spring of 1882 Queen Victoria, at
the age of 62, arrived for the first time on the French Riviera. That region,
which she called a "paradise of nature", wrought a transformation to the last
two decades of her life. Whenever she arrived on French soil her face lit up and
she shed many of the inhibitions of her life in England. She came to the Riviera
nine times, more often than to any other part of continental Europe. "Oh, if
only I were at Nice, I should recover," she said as she was dying.

She spent much of her time on the
Riviera with her strange companions, her dour Scottish gillie, John Brown, the
subject of the recent film, "Mrs Brown", and her troublesome Indian secretary,
the Munshi, Abdul Karim. John Brown, who did not like the Riviera and who
thought Irish revolutionaries were plotting to assassinate the Queen there,
amazed the locals by wearing a kilt together with a topee. The courtiers
threatened to strike if Abdul Karim came to the Riviera, but he came
nevertheless.

Guests included extraordinary European
royalty, such as the reprobate Leopold II, King of the Belgians, who on his
death-bed married a former prostitute, and his daughters, Louise and Stephanie,
central characters in two of the greatest royal scandals of the nineteenth
century.

The visits to the Riviera by the Queen
Empress Victoria, the monarch of what was then the most powerful empire in the
world, were important to the area and to France because they affirmed and
strengthened the Riviera's role as the leading holiday centre for the British,
for other Europeans and the peoples of the Americas. She showed the world that
the Riviera was not just a place for convalescence, but also for holidays.

The importance of her presence is shown
by the increase in visitors during the two decades of her visits, by the concern
of the French at the damage which would be done to the tourist industry if she
were to cancel her trip in 1899 because of bad relations between France and
Britain, by the many hotels, cafes and roads named after her and by the number
of statues erected to commemorate her.

The Queen stayed in Menton, Cannes,
Grasse, Hyères and finally in Nice. In Nice she stayed on two occasions in the
Grand Hotel and on three in the great fin de siècle Hôtel Excelsior Régina,
which was built with her needs in mind. There she received President Faure and
Empress Eugénie and Sarah Bernhardt performed for her. The Monarch had fun in
France and particuarly enjoyed throwing flowers at the young army officers at
the flower festivals. One of her ladies in waiting said that on the Riviera she
enjoyed everything as if she were 17 instead of 72. She described it in her
journal as "this beautiful country I so admire and love."

The book relates the places where the
Queen stayed and visited to the many buildings that are still there today.

The work is based on research in the
Royal Archives at Windsor Castle, the Public Record Office and in archives in
the Alpes-Maritimes. It includes much unpublished material from the Queen's
journals, which give a unique insight into her character in the last years of
her reign.

The book is lavishly illustrated in
colour and black and white. The illustrations include reproductions of
anti-British French postcards, with one of the Queen riding on a bottle of gin,
extravagant Belle Epoque posters and drawings of her activities.

The French Riviera - A History. It ranges from the Terra Amata in Nice,
occupied from 380,000 years ago andone
of the oldest inhabited pre­historic sites in the world,
through wars and revolutions, to the establishment of the
Silicon Valley of France in Sophia-Antipolis in 1974.

Michael Nelson shows
the surprisingly cosmopolitan nature of the area in the
early middle ages by his description of the finishing school
run by Frankish kings in the 7thcentury
where Siagrius, the ruler of the region, had studied and
where the son of king Edwin of Northumbria in England was
also sent.

Colour maps and plates
illustrate the book and it is full of fascinating anecdotes.
Examples are the loan of a guillotine by Nice to Grasse in
the French Revolution andthe
occasion when Jean Moulin, the leader of the French
Resistance in World War II, invited the Germans to the
opening of an art gallery in Nice which he was using as a
front.